Getting here

Of course now that we have a sense that we're leaving India sometime in the near-ish future I am able to love being here just a little more, again.
My mistake, to have been living ahead of myself - poised to get-out-of-here and aiming my focus strictly on the exit, admittedly missing much of what's going on around me in the process; certain I will eventually look back on the experience quite fondly and miss it all very, very much.
Our life here is literally ten times simpler than it will be in the States - at least everything from rent to transportation costs about ten times less here and I do wonder sometimes how we will manage this life at 10x after such an extended holiday from any of the serious business of it all.
Finding the right house in the right neighborhood, helping my darling transition while managing the promise of a legal maze that is his immigration paperwork, expanding our happy little business, and transitioning myself - because I do feel like an alien at this point, gone so long into a life that barely required shoes, much less any other semblance of real-life or responsibility - I am giddy in both directions, good and bad, at the thought of our rejoining the other side of the planet. Like the hermit who preferred a cave, I've become satiated by my self-induced excommunication from the west. Comfortable with what has become normal for me even while I crave what was, or rather, what will be.

Well, what really was anyway?
My life before India, before Hamid, was more like a prayer to consumerism and the drug of the almighty shopping bag than anything else, a credit-fueled blueprint for the rest of my life: empty but decked out. I held a firm belief that everything was for me - with or without repercussions or recourse. I was messing around with life from the perspective of a seemingly invincible youth and beauty with nothing more to worry about than what to wear and where to wear it to.
But it was that same disconnect that allowed me the freedom to drop it all in favor of something that looked better, if even just for the time being. It was what had been pinned to me: "irresponsible" and "spontaneous" that I found to be my greatest assets over the past few years living abroad - for what real adventure can you ever hope to have if you aren't even a little bit of these things? If it is wrong to quit university, work, relationships, and all the rest of it in order to see more of the world, to let go of the idea that the cel phone is a lifeline, to stop letting pointless pricey stuff stand in as a backbone, to shed the-wrong-kind-of-people, and to better realize what it is that actually makes me happy in life rather than referring to the measuring stick of 'what is expected of me' then I'm guilty as charged but not feeling so bad about it in the end.

Looking forward, while trying harder to be very much here, exactly now, I am most concerned, not by the idea of managing that new life we will occupy, but maintaining the aspects of myself that have been fortified by this three+ year sabbatical from the real world and in keeping a safe distance from those aspects purposefully shed.